Activity on our forum

[Q. C. Locatus Barbatus]

Salvete,


We switched from our email lists to this forum because it gives a chance to more direct and on-topic conversations.

We tought it would generate more activity from our (now strongly reduced number of) members. It didn't.

There are 47 members of this forum, from which (a guess, I admit) approximately 40 are SVR-members. Only 23 of them have made at least one post; only eleven people have made 10 posts or more. What has happened? What can we do to make you all a little (just a little) more active?

I hope some-one of our inactive members will read this and will have the courage to react.

A big "thank you!" to all our active members who are trying to make the difference every single day.


Valete,


a slightly disappointed Locatus

PS: not to threaten, but our new regula forsees in actions 'against' inactive members. I hope we no longer have to use them.

[Marcus Octavius Gracchus]

Hi. I'm not a member; just a foreign observer.

I don't think it was a good idea to replace a mailing list with a web site. Although phpBB2 is
an excellent piece of software for what it does, no web-based message board can be as
convenient as mailing lists. Subscribers have to visit the site every day, going to the
bookmarked main page, then looking at the indexes to see if there's anything new, and
perhaps finding nothing. Most people aren't in the habit of continuously reloading
a web site several times a day (except for news sites like CNN or Slashdot).

Mail, however, comes to you instantly; you don't have to seek it out, it arrives. With
proper filtering and categorization, different mailing lists can be routed to different
"folders" (or whatever term your mail client uses). I'm on about sixty Yahoo lists,
and whenever mail arrives for any of them, I'll know about it within minutes, and
can read it right away or wait until later.

But with a web site, even with software as nice as phpBB2, the user has to make
an effort to see if there are new messages. Today was the first time I had been
here in weeks, but when you had mailing lists, I'd follow the conversations as they
were occuring.

I recommend you go back to mailing lists.

Vale, Octavius.

[Anonymous]

I lurk on various Religio forums who have (had?) members here, and I have read that when the switch was made from Tropica to here, some people simply didn't bother to register on the new forum.

Personally I enjoy the these forums, but if the Senate were to switch back to e-mailing lists may I recommend we at least use easy-to-use Yahoo groups? Tropica was just .... bleh.

[Gnaeus Dionysius Draco]

Salvete

Our problem with mailing lists mainly was that we had about 12 of them, and not everyone was on the lists they should have been. As a result, a lot of useless crossposting occurred and some lists were dead for weeks, always being restarted by the same people.

In the end, this got a little tiresome for us. The Censores automatically send invitations to the mailing lists for each new member, and when someone became a member of each Collegium this meant about 8 invitations. And if those people then never say anything, that's disappointing... Additionally, people sometimes posted topics to the ML which belonged to a certain Collegium or vice versa.

A forum was chosen, not only because phpBB2 looks so neat but also because it encourages those who read the forum to look at the other Collegia too (in other words, it reduces the "magistrates'" useless workload). It doesn't require special membership in a dozen lists and you can see immediately when a new posting is made. Agreed, members need to take the effort to come and check the forum on a more or less regular basis... But then again you can just delete incoming mail as well. So I doubt going back to mailing lists would improve our situation.

On a sidenote, I don't think our activity level is too low. It's true that some people who used to be active seem to have gotten lost in the shadows (Maior, Iulianus, Limitanus, Napoleonus...) but we still have an enthusiastic core group. When elected as Aedilis (shameless plug!) I will also undertake an effort to add more essays to the site and to finally deal with translations... So there is hope!

Valete!
Scorpio